by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright February 2010
The Book of Eli has some interesting visuals and pacing. The visuals are new, but the story is... umm... timeless. Yeah, timeless. <sigh> The story is one of the classic Western stories set in a post-apocalyptic future West with the Mc Guffin being a magic book protected by the strong, silent-type wanderer hero. It's a curious mix of setting and story that could go terribly wrong, but doesn't. My technofiction side was cringing all through it, but I left feeling entertained -- it was similar to the reaction I had watching Independence Day back in 1996.
The story is parable, so the disconnect with reality is as complete as in any swords and sorcery fantasy. The setting in this case is a conventional post-apocalyptic world where the people left are scratching out existence in the ruins left behind after a world cataclysm. The geography is a common setting for a western, a generic desert, and water is on everyone's mind.
The Technofiction side of me cringes in these post-apocalypse settings because these people live without resources and without cooperation. You can scavenge for a while, a few months, or so, but in this movie Eli says he's been wandering for thirty years, and the heroine, born after the cataclysm, is a hot twenty something.
The first round of bandits he trashes is a half dozen member gang who preys on passersby. Their lure is a damsel in distress with an overturned supermarket shopping cart. ... Wait! A thirty year-old shopping cart? And who's passing by? After thirty years of these conditions, travelers are only going to travel in well-protected caravans. Other than our hero, that is. So by scene two I have a technofiction cringe. (Scene one, by the way was also illogical, but only in retrospect.)
Likewise, the town he walks into next has been around for thirty years, but has no visible means of support -- there is no commerce, and there are no verdant fields around the town. How does it exist? And, once again, after thirty years of living like this, there is no sign of cooperation among the townsfolk.
Carnegie, the local ruthless and evil war lord, and Eli's main protagonist, wants Eli's book so he can rule more than just this scruffy town... but where are these other places he's going to rule?
The middle part of the movie is letting these characters develop themselves in very conventional ways. It works, only because Washington and Oldman do a a really good job of playing their roles in these conventional character developing settings. There is no exceptionally bad technofiction cringe in the middle.
The last part brings on several waves of cringing:
o Eli lets the hot young girl team up with him.
o The town's water supply is a lightly protected spring in an underground cavern. (and there's not enough for farming)
o Eli and the girl wander across miles and miles of desert with a single one liter canteen.
o They stop at an isolated house, that somehow has water, but only two people living there.
o Eli lets himself get killed for the girl.
o Before he dies, he gets to San Francisco, and there finds good people... whose lifestyle doesn't look that different from Carnegie and his bad people... Are these really good people?
o The girl grows up in a place where only the warlord has cars, but she knows how to drive?
o She sees the sea for the first time, and shows no wonder?
And one technofiction sigh of relief: There is a hint mid-movie that zombies roam the land, but mercifully, they stay off stage.
So, the movie was entertaining for its visual style and for watching Washington and Oldman perform their acting craft in a very conventional western story in a somewhat science fictionish setting. But, like your cell phone, be sure to turn off your internal consistency checker before the movie starts.
-- The End --